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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9104809" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 145: Dec/Jan 2000/1part 4/6Elminster's Everwinking Eye: While Oparl is a playground for the rich, it’s actually exceedingly unfriendly to the poor and casual tourists. There’s not a single inn, restaurant, tavern or other such public convenience to be found, and anyone caught sleeping rough will be escorted out of town by the security detail of the closest mansion for ruining the view, with all the rest coming to help if you fight back. If you want to stay, you need to know someone and wrangle an invitation, or be rich enough to buy/build a place of your own. A depressing example of how effectively having no real government results in public services that help people being cut, but you wind up spending a whole load of money on things to hurt people that become de-facto public services simply because none of the rich people want to be the one with all the beggars on their doorstep through underspending on security. This may wind up costing them more in the long run but oh well. There is one bit of public property though, a manor that’s used for the wildest parties so people don’t have to worry about their own property being wrecked and rented out to travellers who know the right people. It also winds up being the place where the servants do most of the day-to-day shopping for things that keep the manors functioning behind the scenes. Overall, a very interesting example of how unregulated hyper-capitalism devolves into feudal private law that’s not particularly nice to live in unless you’re one of the people on top, but definitely gives PC’s plenty of opportunities for adventure and conflict, whether they’re on the underside just trying to survive or coming in laden down with treasure and able to play in the political games. Bare Bones: Over the years I’ve read many an adventure that’s intended to be your first one, or at least your first with those characters, presuming they have no supernatural experience or equipment that would make the adventure easy to solve. This column decides to go back a little further than usual though, asking what adventure hooks you could construct around birth. You probably aren’t going to be able to actually play the newborn babies, (and definitely not under D&D rules, which don’t have enough granularity at the bottom end to distinguish between babies, various ages of childhood & teenagers) but there are plenty of plots involving dealing with someone else’s pregnancy, from dealing with cravings, to the gradual difficulty of doing normal things as the bump grows, then the birth itself coming at an inconvenient time or having complications and needing your help to make sure both baby and mother survive. If one of the PC’s is the mother this adds a lot of complications to adventuring, particularly if the adventure is the epic kind where you can’t take time out without the world being conquered/destroyed. The kind of adventure they can’t really do in Dungeon because they generally can’t presuppose the nature of the party playing them beyond recommended character level and even with the Code of Conduct officially repealed, leaping into forced gender-swaps and fanfic style m-preg storylines is still several steps too far for their editors. (can’t be putting actual families in our family-friendly entertainment) A reminder that D&D has lengthy and complex rules for the taking of lives, but none at all for making new ones. You could make an RPG that revolved around pregnancy and the development of young children and make it fun but it would be a very different beast. In the meantime, you’ll have to live with any plots involving topics like that running entirely on GM fiat and hope you can still make a good story out of it that way. Hey at least that leaves this column well above average in it’s degree of thought-provokingness.</blockquote>

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